


Asymmetrical

by Glitter_Lisp



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Multiple Personalities, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shiro Kicks His Own Ass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 23:11:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8121292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glitter_Lisp/pseuds/Glitter_Lisp
Summary: Shiro blacks out during a training session. His reflection has yellow eyes. It's a rough day.





	

That last training session was... odd. One second Shiro was flying his lion with no problem, the next Allura fired a laser at him, and then suddenly he was waking up five minutes later to hear the rest of the Paladins cheering in his ear. When they landed and headed inside to shower off, everyone congratulated him on destroying the simulated robeast so spectacularly. Shiro had brushed it off and hoped they assumed it was modesty, not confusion, that made him so quiet.  
  
Now here he was in his bathroom, bent over the sink and splashing his face, desperately wracking his brains for that missing five minutes during practice. Try as me might, he just could't recall the memories.  
  
When he straightened up, his reflection stared back at him with yellow eyes.  
  
Shiro froze. The mirror showed his horrified expression, and despite the prison garb, the fresher scar, and those awful _eyes_ , Shiro might have just thought it was some sort of a trick or faulty wiring.  
  
At least, until the mirror image chuckled and relaxed, leaning his hip against the counter and looking down at Shiro, still bent halfway over the sink. "Sorry. That was too good, but I couldn't hold the pose."  
  
"You- you can't be here!" Shiro gasped. "You're not real!"  
  
"Honestly, I'm realer than you, some days," his reflection said with a shrug. "Ignoring me doesn't make me go away. To be frank, it kind of just pisses me off. And we both know that things don't go well when I'm pissed off."  
  
"I don't-" Shiro began, backing away, and his reflection let out a bark of laughter.  
  
"That's right, I guess you wouldn't know what I'm like when I'm pissed off. You made damn sure of that."  
  
Shiro's mind was going into overdrive. He thought of Haggar, of this version of himself grabbing at his throat and lifting him up, of thick, suffocating blackness, of the Arena-  
  
Except that he wasn't. The panic was still there, and the memories of his fight with Haggar were still fresh in his mind, but unlike his usual panic attacks, there were no thoughts of the Arena. Nothing about gladiator fights or experiments. It wasn't the usual, hazy sense of dread with no distinct memories that he normally had, either. He knew he had been in the Arena. He knew that he had fought and killed and almost been killed. But he felt removed from it, distant.  
  
His breath was coming in faster and faster, because if someone had gone and messed with his head again-  
  
"Hey, stop it." His reflection was frowning at him again. "You're not having a flashback, because I stepped out for a minute so we could talk. Don't drag me back in there just because you want to have a nice little freak out the way you usually do. It's demeaning."  
  
"Who _are_ you?" Shiro gasped, hands clenched into fists.  
  
His reflection smiled at him, and Shiro's stomach lurched at the razor sharp teeth in his mouth. "I'm the _Champion._ "

* * *

"You can't hide from me forever."  
  
"Shut up," Shiro whispered. "Just shut up."  
  
He had fled the bathroom some time ago and locked himself in his room, throwing blankets over every reflective surface he could see when the Champion had just followed him, hopping from the mirror to the window to a vase of fake flowers Hunk had given him to decorate his room. When everything had been covered, the Champion had simply disappeared. It hadn't stopped him from talking, though.  
  
"Sorry, I can't do that. You need to listen to me because your recklessness is causing problems for the both of us."  
  
"My _recklessness?_ " Shiro asked incredulously, then immediately cursed himself for responding.  
  
The Champion hummed softly from wherever he was. It sounded like his voice was coming from the left, but when Shiro dared to peek in that direction he didn't see anything but his blank wall. "You take unnecessary risks, and it yanks me to the forefront. I'm good in a fight, but when you start yelling at me to come save you when you're not fighting, well. I'm really only good for one thing, Takashi, and calming everyone down after you lose your head isn't that thing."  
  
"Don't call me Takashi," Shiro snarled, and the Champion groaned.  
  
"Why not? That's our name, isn't it?"  
  
"It's _mine!"_ Shiro yelled.  
  
The Champion wasn't cowed. "Except that I'm you. It's my name, too."  
  
That was too much. Shiro ripped the sheet away from the window and came face to face with the Champion's reflection, transparent and warped and with stars glowing through him from behind. "You're not me; you're a _monster._ "  
  
"Monster," the Champion scoffed. "Right. I'm the only thing that kept you alive in there. If that makes me a monster, I won't apologize for it." The Champions eyes cut down and to the right suddenly, looking at Shiro's Galra arm. "Punching me won't do anything but get you killed, idiot. Do you want to get sucked out into space?"  
  
Shiro hadn't even realized his arm had started glowing, ready to shatter the glass the way he had with Sendak. As he let it sputter out, he stared blankly at his reflection.  
  
"Why are you _here_?" he asked finally, and tried to pretend that his voice didn't crack.  
  
The Champion smiled, and this time his teeth were straight and even and, above all, human. "I'm here to help you."

* * *

A half an hour later, Shiro had dragged his blanket and a pillow over to the window and sat facing it, deep in conversation with the Champion.  
  
"So, you're effectively the manifestation of my trauma," he said, his third attempt to get a grasp of the situation, and the Champion huffed out an annoyed sigh.  
  
"No. God, no. I was the one who experienced the trauma. I guess it was trauma. Personally, I don't feel traumatized. The only reason you freak out whenever something slips from my side to yours is because you're not equipped to handle what happened."  
  
"And you are?" Shiro asked dryly. To his surprise, the Champion nodded, suddenly solemn.  
  
"I was _created_ to handle it, Shiro."  
  
"So... a personality split," Shiro said. "I have dissociative identities?"  
  
The Champion shrugged. "Close enough, I guess, but Haggar played around in your brain enough that it made me a little bit more than the traditional alter. That, and I'm the only one."  
  
"Haggar," Shiro muttered. "Did she know that we were separate?"  
  
The Champion snorted. "As if. I would have never gotten a break if she found out, and you would have-" He cut himself off and shook his head. "I was born, whether you intended it or not, to protect you. If Haggar had found out that there were two of us in your brain, she would have found a way to drag you forward, and I couldn't have done my job."  
  
"You took care of me," Shiro said. "So I didn't really... experience any of that?"  
  
"No, you did," the Champion said. "Look at yourself. Of course you experienced it. I'm not exactly you, but I also... am. I don't know. Like I said, Haggar did things to you, and it changed me. I'm something different. A little less than a person, a little more than an alter. You could probably make me disappear, given enough time. I'm still you. But not."  
  
"I don't understand."  
  
"Does it sound like I do?" the Champion snapped. "The point I'm trying to make is that you have access to all of my memories, and vice versa, as long as I let you. Beyond that, I don't really know."  
  
"Do you know why you're here now?" Shiro asked. "What made it so that you could speak to me?"  
  
"I think it was Haggar," the Champion said. "She gave me a face. You didn't know I was here before, but once you saw yourself as I am, it gave me an opening. I've been wanting to talk to you about some things, so I just kept pushing. You got scared and pulled me forward during practice earlier, and then I was still solid enough that I could push through to you." He trailed off then, absently rubbing his knees where he was sitting cross legged, seemingly floating in space.  
  
"You said I've been reckless," Shiro prompted, and the Champion nodded.  
  
"You have been. It's stupid and you should stop."  
  
"Well that's helpful, thank you."  
  
"I'm serious," the Champion insisted. "It's not just us anymore. You think you're invincible, or maybe you know you're not but you don't care. I don't know. The point is, you have people depending on you, and if you keep making stupid decisions and jumping the gun, you're going to get yourself in trouble I can't get you out of. For one thing, your Lion doesn't like me."  
  
Shiro blinked. "Black doesn't like you?"  
  
"No, not even a little. I'll do in a pinch, I guess, because she let me beat the robeast, but once the danger was over she started locking up on me like I was some stranger trying to drive her. So you can't count on me to save your ass in an actual fight. Voltron would probably fall apart in a second if I was at the helm. That means you need to be _careful_. If you do something that brings me up, things would go to hell in a handbasket. I'm only a part of you, and it's not the part that's the Paladin."  
  
"No," Shiro said. "I guess you're not. But you are the reason I'm still alive. So... thank you."  
  
The Champion blinked his yellow eyes, obviously surprised, and then smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> First Voltron fic, written for the Voltron kink meme. I actually started wondering about Shiro with dissociative identities a while back, so when I saw a prompt that mentioned dark!Shiro (Kuro) might have been a coping mechanism, my brain kind of exploded. This was fun.
> 
> Also just throwing out there that the "Multiple Personalities" tag is inaccurate, as Multiple Personality Disorder was renamed to Dissociative Identity Disorder in 1994. Technically the Champion as I've written him here is, like he says, more multi-dimensional than an actual alter, which I'm attributing to the Druids and poetic license. But if I did get something really wrong, please let me know and I'll see what I can do to fix it.


End file.
